Jack Unruh: Quick on the draw

Graphis, Sep/Oct 2002 by Frolick, Stuart I

Don't be fooled by Jack Unruh's modest, kicked back, "Aw shucks" persona. The Dallas-based artist may look and act like a "good o1' boy," but he's also one of the most accomplished and recognized illustrators of this or any other generation. That his clients range from The Christian Science Monitor to Rolling Stone only hints at the breadth of his abilities and the universality of his appeal. Unruh is one of the few illustrators alive who can say (and not only boast) that he hasn't been without work in more than 20 years.

Listen to him tick off a list of just his current assignments: "For The Washingtonian I'm doing a piece on the birds people watch at Baltimore's Camden Yards-besides the Orioles. I'm painting three scenes of a caribou hunt for Field and Stream. I'm making a painting for a review of Black Hawk Down for The New Yorker. Boston magazine asked me to illustrate a story on seminars aimed at the newly unemployed. And I did a portrait ofJ.R.R. Tolkien for Entertainment Weekly. Last week I was down at the Los Angeles Dodgers' Vero Beach Fantasy Camp researching a piece for Kiplinger's. That's the challenge and excitement of doing assignments," Unruh says in his not-quite-full Texas drawl. "They're all different. For the most part, I enjoy the limitations. I like taking someone else's size and format and working within those parameters."

An exacting draftsman, and excellent caricaturist, Unruh works with subjects both real and imagined. He uses photographs as reference for the "real" assignments; the "unreal" usually begin with doodling. But even his imaginary work is informed by an ability to see and interpret the natural world, and, it too is characterized by his command of the structural aspects of composition and masterful rendering technique. An example of his approach to both concept and execution is a 1998 piece produced for Red Herring magazine. The article described the alleged manipulation of stock prices by a computer software company. "These guys were in a very tight spot without much room for error," says Unruh. "So I put a figure on a high wire above a net-in this case, the Internet. He's `up to his ass in alligators,' and a small vulture sits at the end of the wire, a symbol of death waiting for him if he fails. Instead of juggling balls, the guy is cascading three ticking bombs (computer crash icons); and in the upper right corner, I've got a graph of spiking stock prices."

Unruh's rendering of a silverback gorilla for the Wildlife Conservation Society/Bronx Zoo in 1999 didn't require the same level of conceptual problem solving, yet it stands out for other reasons. The manner in which he depicts the animal's lush habitat not only attracts and draws the viewer in, it also adorns the gorilla, adding to the reader's appreciation of its beauty too. The primate is tightly rendered around the head and shoulders, with much of its huge body left unfinished. "It's an intuitive choice to leave white space," Unruh says. "I don't know why or how the whole body still reads through, but it does. When I get to working on the area where critters are, I always need something very specific to start from-- leaves or twigs-and then I build up from there."

Unruh has an extensive file of his own close-up photographic snapshots of anything he may be able to use in a future drawing-- weeds, flowers, grasses and the like. He takes a camera with him whenever he goes out hunting or fishing, two of his lifelong passions away from the studio, both of which took hold in his mid-western childhood. Born in Pretty Prairie, Kansas in 1935, Unruh's father was of Russian-German heritage and his mother, of Irish-Scottish. The town of 400 (south of Hutchinson and west of Wichita) still stands and Unruh's 90-year-old mother still lives nearby.

"My dad was in the Air Force; he was always building things-- motorcycles, boats, race cars and airplanes-one of which killed him," says Unruh. An Air Force "brat," he moved repeatedly throughout his early years. By age seven he'd been in four different first grade classes, in Kansas, North Carolina, Louisiana and Florida. Two lasting effects he says, "are the desire to stay put, and the fact that I have no friends from my childhood days."

He found his first companions on the radio-The Lone Ranger, Captain Marvel and Sky King are among the many heroes whose action-adventures captured his fertile imagination. Unruh drew what he heard. "Life could be pretty dull in a small mid-western town, and it was a disaster if you ran out of drawing paper on a Sunday when all the stores were closed." His talent was recognized and encouraged early. Pencil drawings of World War II battle scenes made when he was eight and nine-years-old demonstrate his gifts for visual composition, observation of detail, as well as his need to tell stories through pictures. "I was the one who decorated the classroom blackboards," he says, "and later, my drawing got me out of a lot of tedious chores in the Air Force and Army."